Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Six. Three. Five.

When Kee was a toddler, she used to crawl into my bed in the morning and snuggle in with me while she fell back to sleep. Generally for an hour or two.

Then came the "Mummy. Mummy. Mummy. Mummy. I'm hungry. Mummy." phase, where she started poking me immediately, and didn't let up until I got up to make her some food.

At some point, I decided that she was not going to starve if I didn't hop out of bed at 6 every morning to get her her cereal. She is perfectly capable of getting herself a snack out of the cupboard, or something out of the fridge. So I told her that Mummy will get up when the alarm clock goes.

That worked well for a little while. We were back in snuggle and fall asleep territory. It was nice there.

Now that she's learned to tell time, things are different yet again. She knows that the alarm goes off at 7:30. She will come in, shove me over so she can get in and dutifully report "Mummy, it's 6:32*", then snuggle in. Five minutes later, she sits up, looks at the clock, pokes me and says "Mummy, it's 6:37." Every five minutes, until the alarm goes off. So while I'm not actually asleep, I'm not actually awake either.

Just this morning, she added another little twist. She has become really interested in numbers. She started adding and subtracting, and was fascinated when I started telling her about grouping (multiplication and division), and she's fallen in love with fractions. So any time she sees numbers, she sets about dissecting and reorganising them.

So this morning, I got "Mummy. Mummy. It's 7 0 8. That means that you get to sleep for... okay. Wait. So 8 plus 2 is 10. That means that if I count by 10s, you get 20 more minutes. Plus 2 from the 0 8 part. So 22 minutes! Oh, wait. Now it's 7 0 9. That means..." Right up til 7:30.

It's really hard to sleep through.

I'm starting to think that it would be better to just get up at 6:35* and get the kid her breakfast.

The sad thing is that before we had kids, I was totally a morning person. I'd get up early and have a couple of blissful hours to myself before Husband even moved. I think it's the fact that I have to get up and immediately start doing things for other people that's turned me into a grump.

In the new house, we're having a "get it yourself" breakfast station in the kitchen. They're big enough now that I should be able to trust them. They can't really help it here because they can't actually reach anything without climbing on a counter.

This is Me:

I am a stay at home mum, a writer, and an artist. I've got three amazing little girls. Beege is 10, Keebee is 8, and Bean joined us in February. They keep me on my toes and don't give me time for much else. They call me Mummy, but most people call me Jessica. Oh, Husband is around here somewhere too. (He's pretty awesome.)